International

"Oil prices fell to near $98 a barrel Wednesday amid signs OPEC may raise its crude production quotas at a meeting in Vienna."

Paul Epstein started his career as a physician caring for the poor in Mozambique and Boston. In a new book, the Associate director of Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and Global Environment connects the dots between climate change and its global impacts. They range from cholera outbreaks in Africa and plankton blooms in the Caribbean ... to parasites devastating East Coast oysters.

"The world must invent new ways to protect people driven from their homes by climate change without copying safeguards for those uprooted by wars or persecution, the head of the U.N. refugee agency said on Monday."

"Japan disclosed Monday that its nuclear accident was more severe in its first days than it had previously admitted -- casting new light on how Tokyo's early handling of the disaster briefly sent its relations with the U.S. into one of the tensest periods in years."

"TransCanada Corp's 591,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) capacity Keystone pipeline resumed shipping crude oil, one week after being shut by a leak at a Kansas pumping station, the Calgary-based company said in a statement."

Shark fins do not have any taste of their own. Yet the status associated in Chinese society with earing shark fin soup is causing consumption to rise as the Chinese economy expands. Conservationists call it the single largest threat to sharks worldwide.

Radiation in the No. 1 reactor building at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan has been measured at the highest levels ever, making it virtually impossible for human workers to do much work there.

"The terrifying E. coli outbreak in Europe appears to have been caused by vegetable sprouts grown on an organic farm in Germany, an agriculture official said Sunday as the toll climbed to at least 22 dead and more than 2,200 sickened."

"'I watch them die, young and old,' [Spokane tribal gravedigger Harold] Campbell said. 'I think it’s caused by the radiation.' The radiation is from the Northwest’s only open-pit uranium mines -- an all-but-forgotten chapter of Washington’s Cold War history."

As world demand for staples like wheat, rice, corn, and soy outpaces dwindling growth in agricultural production, food prices are rising and more people are hungry. Now experts are saying that climate change is playing a bigger role than they once expected.